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We’ll never know what might have transpired if Western intelligence agencies hadn’t used the power of the underground drug economy and its criminal syndicates to fight communism during the Cold War. If the CIA hadn’t existed, would we have the levels of addiction we see today? I can’t say. But I can say that covert operations played a significant role in the expansion of drug trafficking after World War II.

Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting — on a process, that is, of subtraction. Ordinarily we think of drug experiences as additive. It’s often said that drugs “distort” normal perceptions and augment the data of the senses (adding hallucinations, say), but it may be that the very opposite is true — that they work by subtracting some of the filters that consciousness normally interposes between us and the world.

At the ranch we used to pray that God would break us so we would become humbled, willing to do his bidding. I didn’t realize then that prayers weren’t necessary to hurry this request along: life will break the proudest heart, bring us to unrecognizable versions of ourselves, like it or not.

I’m sitting in my new primary-care physician’s office discussing the hypoglycemia, fatigue, headaches, and food allergies that have been nibbling away at me for the past fifteen years, like so many hungry mice.

Everyone hated that dog. Every time my friends and I walked by the Hanson house, it was there, chained to a basketball pole at the far end of the long driveway: a huge retriever-mutt-thing, a hundred-and-some-odd pounds of pissed-off mange.

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